This is the 14th Jack Reacher novel and Child shows no signs of tiring of his drifter hero. When a luxury coach on which Reacher has hitched a ride crashes in the middle of the snow-ravaged South Dakota prairie, he finds himself stranded, then co-opted by the local police as they struggle to maintain security at a new prison and combat a ruthless meth dealer who's operating long-distance from Mexico. One of the many delights of Child's extraordinary sequence of novels is Reacher's 360-degree intelligence. The former military cop is emotionally literate, for sure. (On the evidence here, he can add "Olympic-standard flirt" to his CV.) But it's his intuitive understanding of the physical world of traction and flammability and blast radii that makes him so good at anticipating danger – and such entrancing, educational company. Publishing being what it is, there are now Lee Child copycats aplenty. Save your money for the real thing.

Naming the Bones, by Louise Welsh (Canongate, £12.99)

A smart and horribly funny slice of campus gothic in the vein of Simon Gray's After Pilkington, this is Welsh's best novel since her 2002 hit The Cutting Room. When English professor Dr Murray Watson decides to boost the reputation of a little-known Scottish poet by writing his biography, he knows the job won't be easy. Archie Lunan, a notorious boozer, died years before in mysterious circumstances, leaving behind only scraps of indecipherable notes. The consensus among those who knew him is that he committed suicide on the remote island of Lismore. But Watson's research suggests the truth is even stranger and darker . . . Welsh augments her thriller plot with neat satire on academic life and pithy insights into the psychology of those writers who devote themselves to creating "paper facsimiles of lives hurtling towards death". Highly recommended.

Appaloosa, by Robert B Parker (Corvus, £14.99)

Alarmingly, Corvus claims that Appaloosa is the final book by crime legend Parker, who died earlier this year – at his desk, as he worked on a new novel. In fact, it came out in the US in 2005 and is part one of a trilogy of westerns featuring lawmen Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch. Here, they're up against a corrupt rancher, Randall Braggs, who gunned down the titular town's previous marshal. They arrest him, but just as Braggs is about to be executed he escapes, precipitating a series of entirely predictable chases and showdowns which Parker's no-frills prose somehow makes compelling. Given that westerns weren't Parker's main stock in trade – that accolade must go to his Boston-set Spenser novels – it's odd that he chose to do so little with the genre. Wasn't he tempted to subvert it in some way? Still, there's a certain pleasure to be had in watching a master go through the motions.